If mold is pushing cracking through paint, does it mean its inside the wall?

Question

Image is not real but a rough idea of whats happening. As you can see the paint is cracking because mold is growing behind it and pushing out. If the mold was coming from the room I imagine it would be on the surface.

Since it is developing as a lump and pushing the paint out does it mean the mold is growing from inside the wall?

Thanks.

I have added an image where the mold was. Mold was here and pushed/cracked the paint out. It has now occurred to me the wall seems to have paint, followed by paper(as you can see) and the wall underneath isnt hard- its quite soft and knocky. The mold has been cleaned off. from the pic are you able to tell if this is just a surface issue? There is another crack further down but it was making me so sick I couldn't get close enough to take a pic.

Answer 1

Really hard to say for sure; the only way to be certain is to do some slightly invasive investigating. Peel back the paint and see what is going on with the drywall underneath. Is it moldy? Wet? Water damaged? If you still can't tell, drill a 1/2" hole and look at the swarf that gets pulled out by the drill bit. If you can get your hands on a borescope, try poking it in there. Then you'll know for sure.

There is one thing that is certain though: if there is mold behind the paint, it means the conditions under the paint are favorable to support its growth. Clean, sealed and dry sheetrock is not very mold-friendly.

Don't worry too much about saving the paint. At this point it's already failing, so it will come off soon enough even without help. Likewise, drilling shouldn't be a concern; if you're going to end up painting anyway, patching over a few small holes is no big deal.